right back where we started from
by loveleee
Summary: She can feel her heartbeat pulsing through her body, down to the soles of her feet, and the heat of his hands as they cup around the little flame is so close that she can feel it on the skin of her mouth. It's kind of weird, to be honest. (Everlark crossover with The OC.)


**right back where we started from**

When the public defender had offered her a place to crash, Katniss hadn't expected much. The woman's coarse, dark hair was streaked through with gray, her cheeks sagging slightly with fatigue and middle age; there was no ring on her finger, and on a PD's salary Katniss guessed she'd be spending the night on a pull-out sofa in a one-bedroom apartment on the nice-ish side of town.

She definitely hadn't expected a mansion.

"Give me a minute," Hazelle says, and disappears up the winding, manicured walkway to what is apparently her own enormous front door.

So Katniss hovers at the foot of the driveway, uncertain, displaced, right on the verge of making a run for it. There are a few cigarettes left in the pocket of her worn leather jacket, and she slips one between her lips even though she hasn't got a lighter, the stale, bitter taste a small comfort.

There's a boy outside that night, too, standing at the end of his own driveway, and she doesn't notice him until he's just a few feet away. He's blond, tanned, well-fed. His hand stretches out with a match in offering, and after a moment's hesitation, she leans in. She can feel her heartbeat pulsing through her body, down to the soles of her feet, and the heat of his hands as they cup around the little flame is so close that she can feel it on the skin of her mouth.

It's kind of weird, to be honest.

"So you come here often?" he says.

She tilts her head, eyes him coolly. The way Prim taught her to.

"Sorry," he says, not sounding sorry at all. "It's not every day I find a pretty girl loitering at the end of my driveway."

"I'm not loitering," she says, determined to ignore the not-very-veiled compliment, the way the corner of his mouth curled up when he said it. "And I'm not in your driveway."

The boy smiles. "No, you're right. You're in the Hawthornes' driveway." And in the way he says it, there's a question.

Then Katniss blows a smoke ring, straight towards his face, and he's laughing.

"So…will you tell me why you're in the Hawthornes' driveway?"

Katniss looks at him more closely. His eyes are blue like Prim's, and he's taller than her, but not too tall. She doesn't answer.

"What did you say your name was again?"

Her eyes narrow. "I didn't."

"_Katniss!" _It's Hazelle calling, and Katniss drops her cigarette, instinctively knowing it won't be welcome in that giant, shiny, (multi?) million-dollar house.

"Katniss?" The toe of the boy's shoe finds the glowing butt of the cigarette before her own can, grinding it into the pavement. "That's a pretty name."

He doesn't offer his own.

* * *

Hazelle has a son. His name is Gale, and he's seventeen, the same age as Katniss. Her husband – Gale's father – died when Gale was a little boy. He'd been rich.

So that explained the mansion.

Katniss likes Gale. He's tall and good-looking, but clearly unaware of it, and he instantly takes to Katniss like she's the sister he never had.

(She sort of feels like maybe Gale's the brother she never had, too – but she still doesn't tell him about her own dad.)

"I'm glad to finally have someone _real_ around here," he tells her, thumbs tapping a furious pattern over his X-Box controller. Katniss pops a veggie chip into her mouth, washing it down quickly with a swig of orange juice. All the snacks in this house are made of weird, organic shit.

"You mean someone _poor_," she corrects him.

Gale's ears flush red, but his eyes stay trained on the screen. "No…I just mean…" He trails off, distracted by a particularly resilient zombie attacker. "Like, I don't know. You don't give a shit about Louboutins and Kim Kardashian and stuff. It's cool."

He does mean poor, but that's okay. Katniss punches him on the shoulder, and smiles.

* * *

Wednesdays slips into Thursday slides into Friday. She doesn't see the blond boy again, mostly because she barely leaves the house. It's practically a palace. So why would you?

Instead she spends most of her time lying on floats in the Hawthornes' infinity pool, playing video games with Gale, and stuffing herself with the weird, organic snacks that actually turn out to be pretty good. She asks Gale about his next door neighbor just once, casually mentioning that she'd spotted a kid their age over the backyard fence, but he's dismissive. "That guy's a dick," is all he says.

But she can't hide forever, because then it's Saturday night, and Saturday night is The Capitol City Fall Preview Fashion Show. (That's how they all say it: in Capital Letters, because it's Clearly Very Important.)

The dress that Hazelle lends her is two sizes too big, two decades too old and twenty times more expensive than Katniss' entire wardrobe combined. But when Effie Trinket – local socialite, yogalates enthusiast, and professional party-thrower – spies her slinking around the open bar, it's apparently good enough.

"My _goodness_," the woman crows, long nails clicking together as she spins Katniss around by the shoulders. "These hips are so slim I thought you were a teenage boy in drag. What's your name, darling? No, don't tell me – I love a mystery. You'll look marvelous in the Dior. Come, come."

Katniss catches Gale's eye, screwing up her face in a silent plea, but he only grins and wiggles his fingers goodbye. _Bastard._

There are girls everywhere backstage. Blonde girls, skinny girls, pale girls; they're all clones of the same girl, she's pretty certain, except for the short, spiky-haired one dozing in the corner, swathed in floaty green fabric that suits her about as well as a hoop skirt on a tiger.

"Get her in the Dior! The red one!" Effie Trinket proclaims, her fingers locked in a death grip on Katniss' bare shoulder. Suddenly there's a woman tugging down the zipper of her dress; a woman forcing another, brighter, sparklier, _heavier _dress over her shoulders; a man pulling her hair from its tightly woven braid.

"What are you doing?" A younger, shriller voice pipes up from somewhere to her left, and one of the blonde girls pushes her way to Katniss' side, wearing nothing but her panties and a strapless push-up bra. Katniss averts her eyes. "I thought I was wearing the Dior."

"Glimmer, I'm sorry, but not with that rear end. Talk to Venia, I'm sure she's got something we can make work." Effie Trinket purses her lips just long enough to convey sympathy, and then she's off, tottering away on her heels towards the hair and makeup tables.

Glimmer gets in close to Katniss' face. If looks could kill. "That is _my _dress," she grits out.

She seems to expect some sort of response. "Um," Katniss says.

"Who the hell _are _you?"

"Someone who looks a lot better in that dress than your ass would." It's the girl in green, now fully awake and sauntering towards them in bare feet, her eyes flashing. "Fuck off, Glimmer."

"Fuck you, Johanna," Glimmer spits back, but she does fuck off, so.

"Uh…thanks, I guess," Katniss says, tugging uncomfortably at one of the straps of her dress.

The girl, Johanna, doesn't answer at first, her face set in grim satisfaction as she watches Glimmer's bare back disappear into the mill of skinny, pale bodies. "Sure," she finally says, her eyes tilting back to Katniss. She frowns. "Are you a freshman or something?"

Katniss shakes her head. "I'm, ah, the Hawthorne cousin," she says. "From…Boston." She's been parroting the white lie all night – necessary, Gale had explained, to head off the panic that would result among the housewife set if they learned a bona fide juvenile delinquent was hidden in their midst, preying on their innocent, wide-eyed children.

"The Hawthorne cousin," Johanna repeats. "Okay. Well, good luck out there."

* * *

The show goes on for at least an hour, but it's little more than a blur of colors and bodies and lights to Katniss. By the time it's all over, she feels like she's been through a war zone.

She's still blinking the afterimage of the flashing cameras out of her eyes when she emerges from the backstage area, still swathed in the red Dior dress; the one she'd borrowed from Hazelle is nowhere to be found. Gale's waiting for her by an empty table, drink in hand, and she accepts it gratefully, pleased to find that the ginger ale's been spiked.

"I can't find your mom's dress," she says in a rush.

Gale shrugs. "Don't worry about it. She won't care. Seriously," he adds at her look of disbelief. "She does not give two shits about her clothes. She just dresses up nice at these things so they don't run her out of town."

"You sure?" Katniss presses, only taking another sip once she's been reassured by his emphatic nod. "Ugh. Well, I still want to get out of this thing – can we go now?"

Now it's Gale's turn to look guilty. "I, um, I actually thought – well – there's this after party."

Katniss finishes her drink with one last, satifying swig, setting the empty glass heavily on the thick white tablecloth. "I thought you hated every single person in this town."

"I do," he assures her. "There's just. This girl."

"A girl." She so does not need to hear this.

"Yeah. Her name's Johanna, and –"

"Wait. _Johanna?_"

"Yeah. Johanna. Wait – you know her?"

"Yeah. Well, kind of. Not really." She explains their backstage encounter, conveniently leaving out the part where she's 99 percent sure Johanna would eat Gale alive, given the chance.

"Perfect." Gale grins, rubbing his hands together in delight. "You know me, you know Johanna, it's a party, let's go!"

* * *

Relevant facts Gale had conveniently left out of his invitation to the party:

1. It was at an enormous beach house over a thirty minute drive away.

2. Said house was owned by the parents of Glimmer Fischer.

3. Seriously. It was _Glimmer's_ party.

4. Gale didn't technically have the authority to invite Katniss to the party, because Gale technically wasn't invited to the party himself.

"She's probably too high to even notice you're here," Gale shouts over the loud chatter and thumping dubstep as Katniss sulks in a corner of the kitchen. "Look!"

Katniss follows the arc of his pointer finger. Glimmer is standing barefoot on a glass coffee table in a bikini, her back to them, jerking her body somewhat in time with the rhythm of the music as smoke trails from a blunt dangling between her fingers. Fair enough. She looks _really _high.

"Cool, then it's the perfect time to just slip out unnoticed," Katniss says, keeping her arms folded over her chest.

Gale's shoulders slump a little, and he lowers his voice. "I'm sorry I dragged you here. It's just…it's going to be senior year, and I've gone my whole life without speaking to Johanna, and –"

"Hold up." Katniss narrows her eyes. "You've never even _spoken _to her?"

"Well, there was this one time in study hall –"

"I can't even deal with you right now. I'm going outside."

* * *

_Great decision,_ Katniss thinks, inhaling a deep breath of salty beach air.

She wiggles her toes in the sand and only hesitates a moment before plopping down altogether, stretching her legs out before her. Fuck this party. Fuck this dress. Fuck this _place_.

She thinks of home – of her mother, distant and vacant; of Prim, confident and cool and probably already ruling the Twelfth District Correctional Institute for Women by now, all the other drug runners and embezzlers and attempted car thieves wrapped around her little finger.

She thinks of how close she came to ending up in juvenile detention herself, and how she'd be there now if it weren't for Hazelle Hawthorne's bleeding heart. How she'd probably be on her way there again, attempting another break-in, if Hazelle hadn't offered her refuge in the form of a semi-furnished pool house.

She doesn't want to be here, but she doesn't want to go home, either.

"Katniss?" A boy's voice behind her breaks the silence, and she digs her heels deeper into the sand. Guilt tugs at her stomach. She'd been mean to Gale, and he hadn't _really _done anything wrong. He just had a dumb, hopeless crush.

"Did you talk to your dream girl?" she says, hoping her tone is sufficiently light enough to serve as an apology.

There's a pause. "Well, I guess I am now," the voice says, much closer now, and it turns out it isn't Gale at all.

It's the blond boy, the boy with the match.

She hopes it's too dark for him to see her face flush. "I thought you were someone else."

"That's okay," he says pleasantly. "Mind if I sit?"

Katniss shrugs, and he settles onto the sand beside her, keeping a respectable space between them.

The smile on his face fades as it becomes clear she's not going to jumpstart the conversation. He clears his throat. "So what's up? I thought you could use some company."

"You saw me sitting by myself and didn't think maybe I was out here because I _didn't _want company?" She steals a glance at his profile, and sees his jaw visibly tense.

He sits up, poised to leave. "Sorry. I shouldn't have assumed. I'll leave you alone."

"No," she says, sighing. "No, you can stay. It's just been a long night."

The boy pauses, then relaxes, leaning back on his elbows as casually as if they've known each other for years. "Want to tell me about it?"

"No," she snorts. "I don't even know your name."

"Oh," he says. "It's Peeta. I'm Peeta Mellark." He extends his hand, and she shakes it.

"Hi," she says.

"So now that we're friends," he says, "_now _do you want to tell me about it?"

Katniss laughs despite herself. "_No_," she says.

"Did it have anything to do with your modeling debut tonight?"

She looks at him sharply. "What?"

"It wasn't your debut? I have to say, I didn't peg you for a runway model, but I've been wrong before."

"No, I – you were there?"

"Of course I was there," Peeta says. "Everyone was there."

"Oh." She isn't sure why, but she feels somehow discomfited, knowing that he was there – that he was watching her fumble her way down that ridiculous catwalk in this ridiculous dress. "I'm not a model," she says.

"Could've fooled me." He flashes her a smile, disarmingly sweet and shy all at once. "You looked beautiful in that dress. Still do."

Warmth floods through her limbs, and Katniss forces her eyes away from his gaze, confused by the pleasant heat that's suddenly impossible to ignore between her legs.

"Thanks," she mutters.

"So what brings you here?" Peeta asks, his own cheeks slightly pink. "Are you starting at Capitol in the fall?"

Katniss hesitates. Somehow – and she can't pinpoint why – it doesn't feel right to repeat the well-worn "we're cousins" lie to Peeta. "I don't know," she says honestly.

"Okay," he says, unruffled by her lack of an answer. "Well, if you _are _going to Capitol and you need someone to show you around…I know it pretty well."

"Cool," she says, noncommittal. Capitol Academy is the exclusive private school Gale attends, too. Classes start in two weeks – Gale's been bitching about it for days now. Katniss definitely won't be attending.

For a moment they're silent, caught between the soft roar of the ocean and the bassline beating dimly from the house behind them. "So do you, um." Peeta glances at her, then down to where his fingers are tracing circles in the sand. "Do you have a boyfriend?"

Katniss swallows. "No."

Peeta nods, mostly to himself. "That's cool."

"Do you know Johanna?" she asks, desperate for a change of subject.

"Johanna Mason? Yeah," he says. "She's pretty much my best friend. Why?"

Why indeed, Peeta. "She scared Glimmer away," Katniss says, cringing on the inside as she scrambles for a way for that to make sense. "At the fashion show. Glimmer wanted to wear my dress. Also my friend Gale likes her."

Peeta perks up at that last bit, and Katniss regrets it immediately; contemplates just throwing herself into the ocean so he'll forget all about it. Gale does think Peeta's "a dick", after all. Alas, he latches onto it before she can pull her feet out of the sand. "Gale _Hawthorne_ likes Johanna?" he says, exuding disbelief. "Have they ever even spoken?"

"I don't know," she says. (Lie.)

"I can't believe that," Peeta says, shaking his head. "I mean – I know you're friends – but me and Johanna are tight, and that guy _hates _me. Actually, I'm surprised you're even talking to me right now, how much he hates me."

"He never said anything," she says. (Lie. Again.) "Why's he hate you?"

"I don't know!" Peeta exclaims, seeming genuinely upset that Gale Hawthorne – who Katniss increasingly suspects is some kind of social pariah at Capitol – hates him. "I invited him to my birthday party, like, _every year _until seventh grade, and he never came."

Katniss holds back a smile – he's just so _indignant_ that someone wouldn't fall prey to his charms. "What happened in seventh grade?"

"What happened?" Peeta shrugs. "Nothing. I just…stopped." He scrunches his nose up. "Shit, maybe I really _am _an asshole."

Katniss laughs. "I forgive you."

"Yeah?" He grins at her, and for a moment she's hit by the full force of his warm smile, his upbeat attitude, his clear blue eyes. Her heart actually skips a beat, until she tells it to _settle down, we're just walking here. _"Good. I feel better, then. Katniss…what's your last name?"

"Everdeen."

"Katniss Everdeen doesn't think I'm an asshole." He leans in slightly towards her. "I have a feeling that makes me special or something."

"I do know a lot of assholes," she admits, dodging the implication she's pretty sure he's going for.

Peeta leans in even closer. "Do you –"

"KATNISS!"

Katniss has no idea how she ever mistook Peeta's voice for the sound of Gale charging ebulliently down the dunes. She twists around to see him, Peeta following just a second later, and as soon as he does, Gale stops in his tracks, his face dropping instantly into a scowl.

"Oh," Gale says. "Hey Peeta."

"Hey."

Their tones are frosty, their jaws set. Katniss rolls her eyes.

Gale's eyes dart between Katniss and Peeta with suspicion. "I didn't know you two knew each other."

"We don't," Katniss says. At Peeta's wounded look, she sighs. "We didn't. We do? What's going on, Gale?"

He won't take his eyes off of Peeta. "Nothing. I mean, I'm ready to go home. Let's head out."

Katniss moves to stand, but stops at the touch of Peeta's hand on her forearm. "I could give you a ride, if you don't want to leave yet," he says. "We are neighbors."

Her stomach flutters with possibility, but she stamps the feeling down. Not now. Not ever. Not in Panem freaking County.

She smiles slightly, but pulls away, shaking the sand off her skirt as she stands. Hopefully no one was expecting to get this dress back, because it's completely ruined, coated in damp patches of sand and saltwater. "That's okay," she says. "I'm getting tired anyway."

"You sure?"

Katniss hesitates. Behind her Gale is already halfway up the dunes, kicking at the sand impatiently as he waits for her. "I'm sure," she says.

Peeta pushes himself up to his feet, too, stumbling slightly on the shifting sand. "I'll see you again, right?"

Katniss looks past him, to the ocean. Tonight's the first time she's seen it in six years, though the house where she grew up is only an hour inland.

It's been nice, these past few days. Almost like a vacation. Gale is fun, and Hazelle is wonderful, and Peeta…if Peeta wasn't from here, and she wasn't from there…well.

It doesn't really matter, does it – because her next court appearance is on Monday, and it's not like Hazelle's going to _adopt _her.

"Maybe," she says.

She follows Gale up the dunes. And when she pauses to look back, Peeta's there, like she knew he would be; watching them leave, silent and still as the tide splashes over his feet.

* * *

**Thank you for reading! This was written for Day 6 (Purple) of the August 2014 Prompts in Panem challenge on Tumblr. :) Also, 2 things:**

**1. If you are one of the people who's been following my WIPs, well, I am so sorry. I went through a pretty long slump of writer's block (and I hope this is the beginning of the end of that.) Thank you so much for all the notes and reviews you've sent me - I truly appreciate it!**

**2. I also went somewhat MIA on tumblr because I got locked out of my account. I'm now at imreallyloveleee . tumblr . com. Still trying to get back into the original one, but that's why you haven't heard from me in a really long time!**


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